The following is a spoiler-free review of Netflix's Diagnosis.
Fans of the aughts hit House, M.D. are in for a treat this weekend as the series' real-life inspiration arrives on Netflix — this time, with a TV show all her own.
Dr. Lisa Sanders, a world-class physician from Yale specializing in complex cases, heads up Diagnosis. A docuseries based off of Sanders' long-running New York Times column of the same name, the show plays out much like the beloved Hugh Laurie drama.
But, there's a twist. Unlike doctors cursing the creation of sites like WebMD, Sanders actively encourages her patients to turn to the web for answers, asking anyone with an internet connection for a second opinion on her patients' undiagnosed conditions.
It's the basis for the series' central thesis — that the world can solve the unsolvable through crowdsourcing — and at first, it sounds like a disaster in the making. Seven episodes later, however, and you'll get where Sanders and her thousands of unpaid consultants are coming from.
Using her platform at the Times to describe these mysterious cases in detail, Sanders asks her readers to brainstorm underlying causes and then submit videos to her explaining their reasoning. Fellow medical professionals from psychiatrists to veterinarians and enthusiastic laymen with a hunch offer up their thought processes for consideration. Then, when Sanders finds a promising answer or two, she brings that data to her patient and their stumped physicians as a jumping off point.
It's not the kind of experiment one could recreate at home, and the series actively discourages you from using it as a substitute for a professional consultation. But watching Diagnosis, you can't help but feel like you're getting a personalized crash course in medical investigation — and a how-to on finding a doctor that genuinely cares about you.
No matter how complicated the case or frustrated the patient, Sanders shows a relentless tenacity for helping. While there isn't always a treatment available for her patients (no matter how many people she asks), Sanders knows there is at least a diagnosis — and possibly, other patients out there who can make her patient feel less alone.
From a seven-year-old facing the possibility of devastating brain surgery to a Gulf War veteran with sporadic memory loss, the subjects of Diagnosis are never presented as props to Sanders' stories. The series is a loving and caring tool, created for these people. Their well-being is its main goal, with education and poignant storytelling presented as a secondary hope.
In one particularly moving sequence, Sanders works with a teenager who has a history of negative experiences with physicians who dismissed her chronic vomiting as bulimia. Sanders describes in detail how she believes the medical community has failed this patient so far by reducing her to a stereotype.
In another episode, Sanders relentlessly investigates a clerical shortcoming at the National Institutes of Health that left a young girl and her desperate mother without her test results for two full years — information Sanders insists they were entitled to as soon as it was available.
The concept of patients being owed anything seems foreign in the world of televised medical mysteries, with series' — like House — regularly positioning doctors' perspectives as the only ones that matter. In Diagnosis, that simply isn't the case.
While you will almost undoubtedly be a certified Sanders Fan by the end of your viewing, this series is a love letter to patients and the people who care about them — not another ego boost for the medical community. Created with a sense of duty and service, Diagnosis is a reminder that we all deserve to be heard, with or without a medical degree.
Diagnosis is now streaming on Netflix.
